Economics
Universidade Europeia
Instructor: Paulo Fagandini, PhD
📧 EMAIL HERE
Official source of material and communication: MOODLE HERE
📖 Shapiro, D.; MacDonald, D.; Greenlaw, S. A. (2022). Principles of Economics 3e. OpenStax.
This book is free and you can get it from https://www.openstax.org.
There are two ways to pass this course:
Continuous assessment: Two midterms, 50% each, multiple choice and written questions (with computations and drawing graphs). Weighted average needs to be greater or equal than 10 (out of 20).
Final Exam: A single written exam, covering the whole semester worth 100%. Needs a grade above 10 (out of 20) to pass.
Key concepts that will appear during any manager’s career:
Economics helps you to make rational decisions by relying in optimization principles and helping you understand your environment.
Economics
Economics is the discipline that looks to manage and allocate scarce resources to satisfy unlimited needs.
To manage efficiently a system you need to know how it works! For this we study:
While Economics is a discipline, the Economy is a system, the whole set of agents interacting according to some pre-established rules.
In sum, economics is the study of how humans make decisions in the face of scarcity. These can be individual decisions, family decisions, business decisions, or societal decisions.
Scarcity means that human wants for goods, services and resources exceed what is available.
Economics is greatly impacted by how well information flows through society. After all, the more and better information we have, the better decisions we can make.
Tiktok, Meta, X, etc. have a huge role (and grip) in the information highways these days!
It is easy to verify that scarcity is a characteristic of our economies:
This is the way in which different workers divide required tasks to produce a good or service.
Dividing and subdividing the tasks involved with producing a good or service, produces a greater quantity of output.
Specialization - when workers or firms focus on particular tasks for which they are well-suited within the overall production process.
Economics is concerned with the well-being of all people, including those with jobs and those without jobs, as well as those with high incomes and those with low incomes.
Microeconomics focuses on the actions of individual agents within the economy, like households, workers, and businesses.
Macroeconomics is the branch of economics that focuses on broad issues such as growth, unemployment, inflation, and trade balance.
Shapiro, D.; MacDonald, D.; Greenlaw, S. A. (2022). Principles of Economics 3e. OpenStax.
Chapter 1
Economics